Poetry Terms
Time to take some notes!
Poetry Terms – 3 areas of analysis
Musicality
How things
sound
Imagery
Five senses and
kinesthetic
and organic
(physical
sensation)
Rhyme
Scheme
End rhyme and
internal
rhyme
Poetry Terms – A Closer Look
This includes
Alliteration,
Assonance
and
Consonance
Musicality
Musicality
Alliteration is the repetition of initial
consonant sounds in neighboring words.
Example: And sings a solitary song /That
whistles in the wind
 Assonance is the repetition of vowel
sounds but not consonant sounds.
Example: fleet feet sweep by sleeping
greeks
 Consonance is the repetition of final
consonant sounds. Example: She sat, feet
in front.

Musicality
We Real Cool
The Pool Player.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
We Real Cool
The Pool Player.
Seven at the Golden
Shovel.
We real coo l. We
Left schoo l. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Alliteration
Assonance
Consonance
Old Woman
The owl-car clatters along, dogged by the echo
From the building and battered paving-stone.
The headlight scoffs at the mist,
And fixes its yellow rays in the cold slow rain;
Against a pane I press my forehead
And drowsily look on the walls and sidewalks.
The headlight finds the way
And life is gone from the wet and the welter- Only an old woman, bloated, disheveled and
bleared.
Far-wandered waif on other days,
Huddles for sleep in a doorway,
Homeless.
Alliteration
Assonance
Consonance
 Imagery
Imagery
is language that evokes
one or all of the five senses - sight,
hearing, touch, taste, and smell. It
also includes kinesthetic sense
(physical movement) and physical
sense (organic)

Repetition is the repeating of a word, a phrase or an idea
for emphasis or for rhythmic effect. Example: “someone
gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door”
Foreshadowing
Often times, this gives us
“clues” as to what may be
coming up
“She had always been a good girl, but that was
about to change…”
Rhyme Scheme
 For
End Rhyme, label the last word with
letters from the alphabet. Increasing
each letter with each new rhyme you
find.
 Remember that Repetition, Alliteration,
Consonance and Assonance also still are
at play.
 Rhyme Scheme will add to the musicality
of a poem.
Sonnet Form
 Elizabethan
form our focus
 14
lines
 Love poems
 End Rhyme Scheme for Elizabethan form:
 Abab/cdcd/efef/gg
Romeo and Juliet
Prologue/ Sonnet
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Two households, both alike in dignity, (A)
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, (B)
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny (A)
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean (B)
From forth and fatal loins of these two foes (C)
A pair of star-cross’d lovers taker their life; (D)
Whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows (C)
Doth with their death bury their parents strife. (D)
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love (E)
And the continuance of their parents’ rage (F)
Which, but their children’s end, naught and could remove
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage; (F)
The which if you with patient ears attend, (G)